On-Line Tax Guide, Mediachest, and Tax Protester Legal Theories

Michael Edwards of Mediachest emailed
me to respond to what I wrote about that site
a couple
of days ago. I’d written that the site sounded like an interesting
way to make borrowing easier and more efficient (and thus remove some more
things from the realm of economic, taxable exchange), but also that I
suspected that the site would be used for collecting intelligence about people
for marketing and other purposes. Here’s what Michael Edwards says:

Your concern about Mediachest being a site that “you can expect… will also be
used for marketing research and other forms of privacy-invasive
intelligence-gathering” is valid, but in this case wrong. We have outlined in
our privacy policy what we will and will not do with data. We will
never reveal customer information to anyone, nor will we
exchange or sell it. No business partners will have access to personally
identifying information. Someone might see an ad that is targeted at them
based on what items they own, but if we do this it will all be done on our
server and the company will not have any way to know that you were delivered
the ad unless you purchase the item. On the technology side we would ensure
this by running our own custom ad server that either servers text-ads (a la
google) or if serving images the images would be hosted on our servers so
there would be no
HTTP
Referer logs made to a third party server.

I hope this doesn’t come across as a rant, but I just want to assure everyone
that we take data privacy extremely seriously both as a company and
on a personal level as well.

The Tax Protester Anti-Blog
keeps a running tab of not-quite-clever-enough fringe tax protester legal
theories as they get shot down in court. If you’re ever tempted to declare
yourself a sovereign citizen or take a “slavery reparations tax credit” or
some such — spend some time here first and learn from the mistakes of others.

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